Julian Assange:Information Messiah or Cyber-Terrorist?

Where do you fall on this question? I'm reading "WikiLeaks"byDavid Leigh and Luke Harding who wrote this recent(2010)book for The Guardian.In Britain,the Guardian was the first paper to write about WikiLeaks or use any of the documents they were unearthing.In August 2007,they wrote about the secret Kroll report which claimed to show former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi had siphomed off hundreds of millions of pounds and was hiding them in thirty different foreign bank accounts.WikiLeaks has been made indestructible and beyond cyber attack(due to Assange's skill and others at cryptography) and has provided information in a transparent form to be debated and analyzed by the citizens it pertains to.Assange began his career working on a Commodore 64 and Apple IIe when he was 13 when he lived across the street from an electronics shop in Melbourne,Australia.At 16,he got hold of his first modem and by 17 he discovered hacking.Hacking became addictive to him and he became part of Melbourne's underground in the 1980's with other self-taught teenagers.They wrote code and used slow modems before the Internet.They tired to hack into computer networks and bulletin board systems known as BBSs.He failed to complete his Higher School Certificate via a correspondence course but in the electronic world of computers,he was a god.In 1988,Assange hacked into the Overseas Telecommunications Commission(OTC) in Sydney as a challenge.He and his fellow underground never destroyed anything but it was liberating for them to break into the government owned mainframes.In 1989,Melbourne hackers launched a computer worm against NASA and wrote the message"Your system has been officially WANKed".The acronym stood for Worms Against Nuclear Killers.By 1991,Assange was probably Australia's most accomplished hacker.With others he founded International Subversives magazine,offering tips on "phreaking",which is the process on how to break into telephone systems illegally and make free calls.Around this time,he also hacked into Nortel,a big Canadian company that manufactured and sold telecommunications eqipment.The US Airforce 7th Command Group Headquarters,Sanford Research Institute,Naval Surface War Center,Lockheed Martin's Technical Aircraft Systems plant and a host of other sensitive military institutions including MILNET(US secret defense data network)were hacked..Australia's federal police finally caught up to the hackers and tapped Assange's phone lines.He was finally charged in 1994 and the case was heard in 1996.Judge Leslie Ross stated that the offences were quite seriious but the accused didn't seek personal gain and was more of a "looksee" rather than a malicious hacker.The judge fined Assange $2,100 and stated his motive was simply an arrogance and a desire to show off his computer skills.In 1996,Assange set up a site on the internet giving advice on computer security called Best of Security and had 5,000 subscribers.Assange,like his fellow hackers,was committed to free information,free software and would eventually evolve into WikiLeaks.Assange co-authored several free software programs as part of what would become the open source movement.He and a couple of collaborators invented the Rubberhose deniable encryption systemThe idea that human rights activists who faced torture could surrender a password to one layer of information.The torturers would not realize another layer was beneath it.According to the Rubberhose website,Assange conceived the software after meeting human rights workers and hearing tales of abuse from repressive regimes such as East Timor,Russia,Kosovo,Guatemala,Iraq,Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

More from this book in the next post.